Busy Season Barometer

Busy Season 2026: How Ready Are You? It Depends

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The answers track firm size and practice focus.

On the front lines (clockwise from top left): Winke, Sosinski, D’Angelo, Parent, Kaplow, Gehring

By CPA Trendlines Research

Across the profession, accountants heading into the 2026 Busy Season are not sounding alarms, nor are they celebrating breakthroughs. Instead, they are settling into a steady, almost restrained confidence.

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MORE TAX, PRICING, and THE 2026 OUTLOOK

The latest Busy Season Barometer reveals that firms’ sense of readiness bears a striking resemblance to where they stood a year ago. For some, this signals resilience. For others, it signals stagnation. The portrait that emerges is a profession caught between incremental improvements and persistent operational friction.

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Outlook 2026: Accountants Brace for a Rough Economy

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Expect strong demand for tax planning, business advisory and bookkeeping cleanup work. 

By CPA Trendlines Research

The CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer indicates that tax and accounting leaders anticipate growth in their own firms, even as they prepare for anxious business clients, persistent inflation, and a policy environment that keeps planning on edge.

MORE Busy Season and 2026 Outlook

BUSY SEASON BAROMETER: Join the survey. Get the results

About half of all accountants in the survey are bracing for a deteriorating economy, with a third expecting rosier scenarios, for a net negative 17.2 percentage points. For small and mid-sized businesses, accountants are at a negative 9.3 points.

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IRS Set for a Turbulent 2026 Season as TIGTA Flags Persistent Weaknesses

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Heading into 2026, problems from the past several filing seasons are still unresolved.

By CPA Trendlines Research

The coming 2026 filing season is shaping up to be another high-stakes test of the Internal Revenue Service’s capacity to serve taxpayers and practitioners, with new reports from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration offering an unusually candid look at the agency’s most vulnerable operational seams.

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MORE: Firms Brace for a Tough Tax Season

How smart pros are prepping for tax season:
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Taken together, the findings forecast a filing season characterized by incremental improvements in training but overshadowed by enduring structural constraints in telephone service, submission processing, identity verification, and staffing.

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Barometer: Firms Brace for a Tough Tax Season

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Busy season 2026 clouded by regulatory shifts and client pressures.

Ready or Not: Less than half are ahead of last year’s preparation for Tax Season 2026. On the Front Lines: Clockwise from top left, Cicero, Saul, Krueger

By CPA Trendlines Research

Fewer than half of accounting firm leaders report entering the 2026 busy season in better shape than a year ago, according to the new CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer.

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MORE Tax Practice | TaxPlanIQ Escalates the Battle in Tax Planning Software | How TaxDome and Juno Just Changed the Tax Tech Game | DOGE, Palantir and the IRS: What Could Go Wrong? | Five Million IRS Refunds Delayed by Staff Cuts | IRS Phone Stats Improve—Unless You’re a Tax Pro | ‘Kryptonite:’ IRS Buried under 8 Million Paper Returns | Mounting Delays Undermine Public Trust in IRS Refund Process | Brace Yourself: IRS 25% Staff Cuts Mean Big Trouble for Tax Pros and Clients

The readiness gap, evident across firm sizes and specialties, sets the tone for a season overshadowed by heightened concerns about tax law changes and mounting pressure on margins.

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DOGE, Palantir and the IRS: What Could Go Wrong?

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Palantir and the IRS: Musk, left, Thiel, right

 

Who’s watching the IRS code?

By CPA Trendlines Research

The IRS’s Unified API Layer may be the cornerstone of a digital-first tax administration, even as key voices inside and outside the agency raise red flags about transparency, security, and oversight.

MORE Tax | Mounting Delays Undermine Public Trust in IRS Refund Process | Brace Yourself: IRS 25% Staff Cuts Mean Big Trouble for Tax Pros and Clients | What to Watch in the One Big Beautiful Bill  | IRS’s Big Annual Report: Already Out of Date as Agency Grapples with Chaos and Cuts | Busy Season Barometer Stats: Who’s Responding and How They’re Doing | Accountants Reporting a Pretty Good Year | Tax Season Faceplant: Accountants Overrun by Late Chaos

The partnership with the tech industry is triggering a new kind of scrutiny, not over software performance, but civil liberties. At the center of that concern is Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company that confirms it will work with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the IRS on the API infrastructure. READ MORE →